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Thursday, December 06, 2018

CERN produces marketing video for new collider and it’s full of lies

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just completed its second run. Besides a few anomalies, there’s nothing new in the data. After the discovery of the Higgs-boson, there is also no good reason for why there should be something else to find, neither at the LHC nor at higher energies, not up until 15 orders of magnitude higher than what we can reach now.

But of course there may be something, whether there’s a good reason or not. You never know before you look. And so, particle physicists are lobbying for the next larger collider.

Some years ago, the Chinese expressed interest in building a circular electron-positron collider (CEPC) of 50 miles circumference. Nima Arkani-Hamed was so supportive of this option that I heard it being nicknamed the Nimatron. The Chinese work in 5-year plans, but CEPC evidently did not make it on the 2016 plan.

CERN meanwhile has its own plan, which is a machine called the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Three different variants are presently under discussion, depending on whether the collisions are between hadrons (FCC-hh), electron-positions (FCC-ee), or a mixture of both (FCC-he). The plan for the FCC-hh is now subject of a study carried out in a €4 million EU-project.

This project comes with a promotional video:

The video advertises the FCC as “the world’s biggest scientific instrument” that will address the following questions:

What is 96% of the universe made of?

This presumably refers to the 96% that are dark matter and dark energy combined. While it is conceivably possible that dark matter is made of heavy particles that the FCC can produce, this is not the case for dark energy. Particle colliders don’t probe dark energy. Dark energy is a low-energy, long-distance phenomenon, the entire opposite from high-energy physics. What the FCC will reliably probe are the other 4%, the same 4% that we have probed for the past 50 years.

What is dark matter?

We have done dozens of experiments that search for dark matter particles, and none has seen anything. It is not impossible that we get lucky and the FCC will produce a particle that fits the bill, but there is no knowing it will be the case.

Why is there no more antimatter?

Because if there was, you wouldn’t be here to ask the question. Presumably this item refers to the baryon asymmetry. This is a fine-tuning problem which simply may not have an answer. And even if it has, the FCC may not answer it.

How did the universe begin?

The FCC would not tell us how the universe began. Collisions of large ions produce little blobs of quark gluon plasma, and this plasma almost certainly was also present in the early universe. But what the FCC can produce has a density some 70 orders of magnitude below the density at the beginning of the universe. And even that blob of plasma finds itself in a very different situation at the FCC than it would encounter in the early universe, because in a collider it expands into empty space, whereas in the early universe the plasma filled the whole universe while space expanded.

On the accompanying website, I further learned that the FCC “is a bold leap into completely uncharted territory that would probe… the puzzling masses of neutrinos.”

The neutrino-masses are a problem in the Standard Model because either you need right-handed neutrinos which have never been seen, or because the neutrinos are different from the other fermions, by being “Majorana-particles” (I explained this here).

In the latter case, you’re not going to find out with a particle collider; there are other experiments for that (quick summary here). In the former case, the simplest model has the masses of the right-handed neutrinos at the Planck scale, so the FCC would never see them. You can of course formulate models in which the masses are at lower energies and happen to fall into the FCC range. I am sure you can. That particle physicists can fumble together models that predict all and everything is why I no longer trust their predictions. Again, it’s not impossible the FCC would find something, but there is no good reason for why that should happen.

I am not opposed to building a larger collider. Particle colliders that reach higher energies than we probed before are the cleanest and most reliable way to search for new physics. But I am strongly opposed to misleading the public about the prospects of such costly experiments. We presently have no reliable prediction for new physics at any energy below the Planck energy. A next larger collider may find nothing new. That may be depressing, but it’s true.

Correction: The video in question was produced by the FCC study group at CERN and is hosted on the CERN website, but was not produced by CERN.

"scientists didn't choose anything. Videos like this are left to the press department. I told you this, Frédéric told you this, probably someone else told you this."

So what is it? The content of the video is scientifically accurate, as you have so far told us, or it's not but scientists had nothing to do with it?

As an aside, I spoke with the guy who produced the video and probably know more about it than you do.

You comment here as a particle physicist and employee of CERN. All your have produced so far are ad-hominem attacks and attempts to distract from your lack of knowledge by posting irrelevant references. You have delivered pretty good reasons to defund your discipline. It has certainly convinced me.

I have explained very clearly why the statements in the video are grossly misleading. Every particle physicists who knows their subject will understand that what I have written is correct. A technical report would never make such ridiculous claims. In fact the report in question does not contain any such claims. I did of course not read all 900 pages, but I read the relevant parts of the manuscript. Did you? Based on your comments so far, I highly doubt it.

We are still waiting for you to justify your claims that the FCC will "study and discover" the origin of the universe, and we still have not heard any of the promised mathematically sound reasons for the FCC discovering dark matter or dark energy. Has it doomed on you yet that there are not any?

You seem to be saying now that it's okay to mislead the public because, hey, there's always an incomprehensible 900 page report that anyone can look at. Your "arguments" are so beyond the pale, it seems superfluous to even debunk them. You are doing a much better job than I ever could.

My exact words backed by my exact bibliographical references, see message of 9:09 AM, December 19, 2018 .. plus other following. You have dismissed the links to the short versions of the CDRs for the 3 different machines and their physics potential (from me again), and have dismissed as an outlandish work the 900 pages arxiv document suggested to you as a basis for discussion from another participant to your sorry blog... as if he had asked you to read and comment all n of it at once. Childish to say the least.

You use scare tactics and silly arguments, like a not-completely-grown-up person. You don't like the answers and therefore the answers are wrong, or "read why I don't like them in my book". Is this the best you can do? Kind of depressing...

I looked at all the references you posted. They do not contain mathematically sound reasons for why the FCC should find any of the new particles. If you think they do, you must have misread them. I already told you that weeks ago.

@SabineMy point is that by attacking the video you are essentially fighting a straw man because we both know that not a single senior author on that report I linked to has spent more than 5 minutes thinking about this video. Yet you are discrediting them as well and essentially calling them liars too. If you feel so strongly that a 100 TeV is a waste of time and money, then it would be more useful to the community to make your arguments in a paper/preprint as to why they are wrong, instead of using a video of the PR team to argue to the wider public there is no physics case for the FCC and that they are being lied to by money-grabbing scientists.

"My point is that by attacking the video you are essentially fighting a straw man because we both know that not a single senior author on that report I linked to has spent more than 5 minutes thinking about this video. Yet you are discrediting them as well and essentially calling them liars too."

A scientific community that accepts their work is being marketed with hypes and promises that are impossible to fulfill is morally corrupt and should not receive funding. This deception has been going on long enough.

"If you feel so strongly that a 100 TeV is a waste of time and money..."

I didn't say that, but you have pretty much convinced me now that it is indeed a waste of time and money.

"t would be more useful to the community to make your arguments in a paper/preprint as to why they are wrong..."

Oh, but I already did that. See here, here, and here. Of course it doesn't really matter because, as you have been advised, I am just a dumb blogger who doesn't know anything about BSM pheno.

I never claimed or wrote that laypeople are dumb!... Can you refrain ONCE from lying? Laypeople are, demonstrably, not versed at all in grappling scientific concepts, especially in fields which are far off from everyday's life. Were it not nb like that they would simply not fit the adjective "layperson". I'm saying this because I talk very often to laypeople, family, friends, visitors to the lab... and I've comec to realise that just the simple, "mechanistic" description of the layout of the LHC is not an easy thing for them to understand... once one tries to explain why crab cavities are useful to increase/level the luminosity and the likes then they get totally lost in a moment.

Please note, before you put more bad/wrong words into my mouth, that it is very perfectly normal. I've been a layperson when a good friend of mine has taken me to its molecular biology laboratory, at the end of the tour I must admit that I hadn't a very clear picture of what they do, and how. I'm sure that even the smartest theoretical physicist of them all, i.e. you, would have a hard time re-explaining technical details of the LHC as an accelerator, not the experimental/theory part. If you want we can give it a try.

No you haven't. You said I'm getting an award for saying something stupid, but you didn't explain what was stupid about what I said. If you've already explained it, quote the part where you did it.

Roberto wrote: Dr. Sabine which was objecting to me replying to you as such... do you have a problem following the discussion?

Instead of insulting my ability to follow a discussion, why don't you give me a quote from Sabine where she objected to you replying to me as a layperson. You'll excuse me if I don't just take your word for it?

Roberto wrote: You are funnier than Steven with his "my sister got to online dating and was duped"

It's just like you to mock and insult a point rather than demonstrate that you understand it. What some people refer to as "highly optimistic views," other people refer to as lies. It you disagree with that point, act like a grownup and explain why you disagree. Your childish mocking just makes you look like a petulant child who is incapable of having a serious discussion.

Roberto wrote: the laypersons to whom the video was addressed would have immediately understood the technical jargon

That's both irrelevant and condescending. You'll recall that the main topic is the misleading statements for the marketing of the new collider. Even if a video has to be "dumbed down" for laypeople, that doesn't justify making misleading statements. You need to stay focused on the main topic.

It is equally irrelevant and condescending to claim that the new collider isn't expensive because it only costs laypeople a couple of euros. With that kind of logic, I could claim that virtually any project in the half billion dollar range is inexpensive, as long as it costs each American citizen only two dollars.

The bottom line is that public projects have to be justified, both in terms of goals and expected results and the costs. It's common for people pitching a public project to tell taxpayers that the project is inexpensive. It's a routine part of the sales pitch.

Roberto wrote: Fake news, more fake news from the doctor!!

Is it your intention to invoke Trump? You seem to share some traits with him.

Roberto wrote: Says who? You?

Okay, so you think laypeople are dumb. Thanks for clarifying that. I suppose I should feel offended, but I don't. I'll say again that you are unlike any physicist or scientist I've ever known.

Roberto wrote: Who cares?

You cared enough to point out that "most people unfortunately don't even understand the difference between energy and power." You cared enough to point out that the marketing video was dumbed down for dumb laypeople. You think laypeople are too dumb to understand that the new collider isn't expensive. A key part of your strategy is to characterize any challenger as stupid, even qualified challengers like Sabine. It's obvious you care very much, so why are you asking?

Frederic wrote: 6% of the duration of this very short video, so it is hardly "full of" lies

Sabine has already responded to this point, but I'll add my two cents.

I would normally be sympathetic to the argument that "full of" lies is too strong. I might even be sympathetic to the argument that "lies" is too strong a word. As I said in my first comment, I expect misleading statements in marketing videos, even for scientific projects.

But I also have trouble with people who suggest that Sabine has any "agenda" other than the one that she has repeated several times. When you do that, I lose sympathy for your other arguments.

There is nothing implausible or unreasonable about Sabine's stated agenda. Sabine's expectations are higher than mine, and I can't fault her for that. The world needs more people with higher expectations. When I hear Sabine say she wants scientists to stop lying to the public, I see someone who isn't politically correct.

Sabine's bluntness might be more noticeable if it weren't for people like Roberto who post hysterical comments and gratuitous insults. It's hard to point to the speck in Sabine's eye when Roberto has a log in his eye.

Even if Sabine used euphemistic (polite) language, her point would be the same. If Sabine said that the marketing video contained some highly optimistic statements, or some misleading statements, maybe she would ruffle fewer feathers. But the point is, the accusations would remain the same no matter how much lipstick Sabine put on them.

Frederic wrote: If you feel so strongly that a 100 TeV is a waste of time and money . . .

Again Sabine has already responded, and again I'll add my two cents. As a layperson trying to follow this discussion, I get doggone tired of people who frequently misconstrue and misrepresent what Sabine has said. I don't expect this kind of sloppy recklessness in laypeople, let alone scientists. These kinds of careless "errors" (I'm being kind) make following this discussion needlessly unpleasant and tiresome.

Frederic wrote: My point is that by attacking the video you are essentially fighting a straw man because we both know that not a single senior author on that report I linked to has spent more than 5 minutes thinking about this video.

Even laypeople can see the gaping hole in this point. But apparently you thought Sabine wouldn't see the flaw either.

Here in the US, it's common to see political ads on TV that conclude with "I approve this message." This is a result of the Stand By Your Ad provision in the Political Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Can you guess why that provision was included as a part of political campaign reform? Can you guess how that's relevant to the so-called point you made?

Sabine,If you sincerely believe that CERN scientists working on FCC studies are "morally corrupt", then I don't know what to say, perhaps I'd be spending my time more productively arguing with Trump supporters in the comments of a Fox news opinion piece and trying to convince them they should have voted for Clinton.

I tend to agree that there is no particular reason to expect to find SUSY or dark matter at the FCC, but I think the purpose of the LHC and of a future collider is not limited to this. The LHC has made plenty of great advances, see e.g.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.11282

for a recent take on the topic, and a lot more progress can be expected of a higher energy collider. If it ends up also discovering new particles along the way, then that is even better of course, and the whole endeavor will have been worth it a thousand times over. But obviously, there is no way of knowing in advance if that will happen.

Well, we seem to agree for what the science is concerned. Now please note the following.

Particle physicists have been going around for 20 years and told the public that the LHC would find susy and dark matter or maybe extra dimension and so on. You and I and everyone in the field knows that those were not good predictions. But the public cannot judge the value of such predictions.

I am not just saying this from gut-feeling. I know this because I regularly speak to people about this. Even people with a PhD in physics, if their background is not in particle physics, tend to think that those were actual predictions. Now they're confused what happened.

But rather than clarifying what was going on, particle physicists simply go and try the same thing again to get money for the next larger collider.

This is not a behavior I can approve of, and I am as sympathetic to particle physics as you can be without actually working in the field. This field has a big problem and you have to deal with that. Part of the problem is that if someone goes around and makes big proclamations that everyone knows to be wrong, no one says a word.

Eg, the head of Fermilab goes and tells BBC "there has to be new science" (I wrote about this here) and no one corrects it. Baer writes in Scientific American that "theory predicts" that the ILC would find supersymmetry. Again, not a single particle physicists bothers to correct this. (Do I need to tell you why that "prediction" is nonsense?). The same thing happened, of course 15 years ago with Gordon Kane. Everyone knew that his "predictions" are jokes. But no one (except for Peter Woit) said a word about it.

The result is that it now looks like particle physicists cannot produce any reliable predictions. Since you are someone who still works in the field, I hope you will take this to your colleagues: You have to do something about this.

Considering that the cost of our involvement in overseas conflicts is measured in the trillions of dollars (President Trump's estimate 6 trillion), the building of a new accelerator like the FCC seems like a bargain basement project in comparison. Haven't been able to find any estimate on the FCC's construction/running costs, but the LHC cost about 4 billion Euro's, and requires about 1 billion Euro's to operate annually, according to a few sites that I visited.

It would be so much better for the international community to work together to explore the frontiers of science than allocate vast resources towards never-ending wars. With the vast increase in energy imparted to the colliding particles, who knows what might be found? Perhaps a catchy title for a new promotional video could be: "To Go Where No Earthly Particle Has Gone Before" a la Star Trek. Ok, I know it sounds cheesy, but it's just a suggestion.

"I am not opposed to building a larger collider. Particle colliders that reach higher energies than we probed before are the cleanest and most reliable way to search for new physics. But I am strongly opposed to misleading the public about the prospects of such costly experiments. We presently have no reliable prediction for new physics at any energy below the Planck energy. A next larger collider may find nothing new. That may be depressing, but it’s true."

I have been working in experiments of particle physics since the end of the sixties. Started with bubble chambers and ended with (group) planning the LHC CMS experiment.

The Cern accelerator that gave us the bubble chamber film to measure was built with no " reliable prediction for new physics" , the theories then were not really theories in today's sense. Money was spent by european countries on CERN, because mainly the discovery of matter to energy generated the atomic bombs and the reactors, and the powers in politics thought the cost small for exploring the behavior of matter further in energy. That is, were convinced by such arguments by physicists, and considered the money a pittance compared to the military expenses. It was uncharted territory "here there be dragons". CERN attracted young people who wanted to know "why" and "how" and "what" will be there with higher energy, and after 30 years quarks and the standard model emerged as a theory, and NOBODY HAD PREDICTED IT.

In general, physics is about exploration of uncharted territory. Data is gathered and theories emerge and are modified .

The technological advances that accrued by the money spent at CERN are enormous. We would not be here communicating in this way if it were not for the world wide web. I was there for the first informal demonstration which was in the corridor I walked every day to go to my office ( I was on sabbatical). The worth in money to society in general of this WWB overwhelms any money spent on CERN, possibly for ever. It was forced on the researchers because of the many groups in different geographic locations needing to communicate fast. Nobody had predicted this.

The LHC brought a great improvement in mass storage of data, used now generally , again the value worth of this research for society is way over the money spent. There is a page at CERN.ch https://kt.cern/general-public that theoretically inclined people, before putting the cart in front of the horse should read.Particularly people worried about costs, to see that in the end, for society it is worth exploring the unknown ( in this case higher energies) without prejudice about predictions.

Of course it is satisfying when from the current multiplicity of models a prediction is fulfilled, but if there were a unique prediction, there would be no interest in doing the experiment, i.e. going to higher energy.

And there is still a hope that future data will help find a model which will give unexpected handles for energy use, as happened when mm Curie was studying nuclei, at much simpler experiments.

In the sense that the theories are tentative , it would be misleading to stress that they are sure. One should treat them as medieval maps "here there be dragons" in my opinion, good for motivating physicists to work hard, but not reliable.

I just want to stress that models are fine in motivating physicists to spend enormous time babysitting machines and accumulating data, but the experiments are done for the possible unexpected consequences. And also that up to now costs for society have been over compensated , if one sums up the usage of the emergent technology that frontier experiments demand.( same is true for other physics goals too, not just high energy)

the mentioned yellow report https://cds.cern.ch/record/2270978 of CERN in fact PROVES your point that there is no good reason to expect anything new up to the Planck scale.

Please review it - it is astonishingly easy. Of the 716 pages, BSM (beyond the standard model) takes only 150 pages. (That already makes you think...) Of these 150, half is about supersymmetry, which is disproved already. Just read the conclusions of the few sections in the BSM chapter.

Every reader of that report will agree that BSM is not a reason to build the FCC. Yes, that report agrees with you and shows that the FCC should not be built.

As I already said above, I did read the relevant parts of this report, the link of which I received some weeks ago. Of course this report supports what I say. I am only pointing out what everyone in the field knows anyway. Except that some do not want the public to know about it - witness this comment section.

2) I have not seen the video, but from your description it sounded as an effort to get young physicist to commit to 10 or 20 years of effort to build the next experiments, not for the general public including not for physicists who would never babysit an experiment.

Young graduate students, when choosing where they will get a doctorate have to be attracted to the subject. A lot of them are entranced by the current theories and so the possible discoveries are enumerated as lures to catch their attention and do high energy instead of , for example , nano physics.

A lot of the students come to the high energy discipline through the fascination of the current theories. My experience in physic.stackexchange is that most are platonists, i.e. "theory molds reality" and not "one measures and records reality and models it with a theory". The same observation holds for most theoretically inclined physicists.

Thus, as many in this discussion,they think that if the current model says nothing is there, nothing is there. That is a fallacy because the model describes reality only within its region of validity. The "nothing is there" would invalidate a specific model.

We would still be flat earthers if there were no regions of validity for models. Flat earth models work fine within a radius of a few kilometers. We passed that stage during the hellenistic times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth). Still in our everyday life we do not use spherical geometry.

By going to higher energy colliders we want to increase the region of validity of the current models and look for the unexpected too.

Remember the excitement of faster than light neutrinos? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicists-debunk-faster-light-neutrinos . That is what any experimental physicist really wants, an unexpected discovery. Unfortunately in this case it was an experimental error.

The video was not made for young physicists. I know this because I spoke with the guy who produced it.

It's only 1 minute long, why don't you just watch it.

As I keep saying in my lectures, negative results are also results, sure. But if you want to develop a new theory these are not very useful results. What you really need to move on is evidence of a new phenomenon. We are stuck in the foundations of physics because we rely on flawed predictions that deliver nothing but null results. That's not the way forward.

I am guessing the blogger is seeking attention similar to what Trump and Lubos does, or has become deluded.

Blogger claims LHC and Tevatron has made no-discoveries ”fcc would continue trend of nondiscoveries” which is clearly untrue.

A few billions is quite a small sum for a huge science project that unites multiple countries and advances technology significantly even if it would not find new particles unlike its predecessors. In comparison, Jeff Besos got more richer past year than the new collider would cost.

Also the crackpot theory on formation of miniature black-holes would be interesting and not problematic at all since such tiny black holes would also instantly evaporate according to Hawkings bh radiation.

@Mitchell, Thanks for mentioning the Resonaance's blog regarding the G-2 anomalies. I used to frequent that site, but lately had forgotten its name.

Scrolling further down another interesting post "Can MiniBooNE be right?" caught my attention, as I've had a longstanding interest in the neutrino sector. Towards the end of that post the author points to the puzzling absence of muon-neutrino disappearance expected with the anomalous electron-neutrino appearance in the short-baseline experiments. As I read that section my eyes widened as I realized that this is consistent with a model of neutrino interactions I conceived way back in the early 90's, and submitted as a short paper to various popular science venues, and one or two professional journals. None accepted it, which in retrospect I am not surprised at, as the paper wasn't written in a proper professional manner.

I plan to spiff the paper up and send it off to the Miniboone collaboration, and see what they think.

"Sabone: scientists didn't choose anything. Videos like this are left to the press department. I told you this, Frédéric told you this, probably someone else told you this."

If CERN can't ensure that what it puts out as press releases is factually accurate, then perhaps it should now withdraw the video, apologise, and put out a strictly factual video in which named scientists sign off that the content is valid.

It is totally disingenuous to let a PR department exaggerate wildly, and just excuse their activities as if they were naughty children!

"If CERN can't ensure that what it puts out as press releases is factually accurate"

It --> IS <-- factually accurate! There is nothing that needs to be corrected. Surely not for the general public, i.e. the target audience of the video. None of the words written in the 77" video are wrong, or misleading... I've already debunked that here, reporting the video verbatim. Nothing.

The one trying to mislead here is the one who wants to sell her book... to create a fake news case of hideous physicist hungry for taxpayers' money... a B-movie script at best.

If you, or Sabine, or other participant to this discussion are not capable of grasping this simple fact I don't know what to do for you.

One cannot credibly explain away misleading claims by saying that the message was intended for someone else. I am a member of the general public but I saw nothing in that video or the rest of the press releases that told me I should not read or watch. The funding for the new device would come from the general public; so it is a matter of legitimate general interest.

I know you’ve made valient efforts to “debunk” accusations against the video; but you’ve failed. The video was misleading.

To borrow your own words: “If you or other participants to this discussion are not capable of grasping this simple fact I don't know what to do for you.”